Over the past decade alone, biographies of Shakespeare have been published by writers as disparate as Peter Ackroyd and Stephen Greenblatt, Bill Bryson and myself, with more refined offerings from James Shapiro and Charles Nicholl. Germaine Greer has mounted a spirited apologia for his oft-maligned wife, Anne. All began by deploring the practice of deducing details of his character, values and curriculum vitae from his writings, then proceeded, in differing degrees, to do just that. Jonathan Bate takes pride in proving himself the exception.

Bate's earlier study, The Genius of Shakespeare, styled itself a biography of the poet's 'talent and reputation'. Now, 11 years later, Soul of the Age purports to perform the same service for his 'soul', by which Bate means his 'life, mind and world'. Inevitably, the two volumes overlap to some extent; occasionally, they contradict each other.

What the two books do have in common is an illuminating parade of their author's considerable learning, not always worn lightly, and a refusal to stoop to the level of life writing, or cradle-to-grave biography, whose 'besetting vice' is its 'deadening march of chronological sequence'. This does not spare the reader a high quota of 'may well have' and 'my guess/hunch is that', an occupational hazard in this field. And every so often, Bate catches himself wandering off-message, as in his theory of the transformation of Shakespeare's doctors from comic figures to professionals of more substance after the poet's daughter married a 'mature and learned' one in 1607.

Bate's manifesto otherwise gives him the freedom to flit from topic to topic, poem to poem, play to play, expertly analysing the literary, intellectual, historical, political and cultural contexts in which Shakespeare was writing. He divides his book into seven sections, unashamedly based on the 'Seven Ages of Man' speech given to the melancholy philosopher Jaques in As You Like It. If this seems a rather contrived device, Bate is soon using it with characteristic craftiness. He manages to reach as far forward as Shakespeare's will in the very first section, supposedly on the 'mewling and puking' infant, by a sleight of hand concerning one of its executors. After this, it comes as no surprise that 'The Schoolboy' offers a springboard to dive into the deeper waters beneath the Elizabethan school curriculum, 'The Lover' carte blanche to mine the canon for love's labours and perplexities including sex scandals and the pox.

There are moments, however, when Bate would have been well advised to tread more carefully. Early in his section on 'Justice', he swats aside the 'purported' Lancashire connections of his youth as 'discredited in the early 21st century'. When he wrote Genius, Bate's professorial chair was at Liverpool; now that he has relocated to Warwick, and forged close professional links with the nearby Stratford Shakespeare industry (not least as a governor of the RSC), he lays himself open to the charge of sharing its vested interest in opposing the north west's claim to a stake in our national poet. Moreover, it is wrong to declare that the arguments for the young Shakespeare's links with Lancashire have been 'discredited'. They have simply been assailed by such arch-Stratfordians as Stanley Wells.

Much the same might be said of the related Catholic Shakespeare industry, dismissed here despite the work of such respected scholars as Eamon Duffy. Bate's anti-chronological, scattergun approach, moreover, does come at the expense of any sense of the evolution of the poet's mind over one of the most turbulent half-centuries in English history. But these are caveats of the kind that fuel the eternal, ever-shifting Shakespeare debate. This impressive book offers riches enough to reaffirm Bate's reputation as one of our most original and assiduous Shakespeareans.